Managua!!

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September 13th 2009

Published: September 13th 2009

Por fin!! After about two months of orientation and language school we are finally here in our house in Managua! It is VERY exciting! We arrived last Sunday morning and have spent the week setting up the house and getting to know the different projects Cantera has. It has been very exciting but exhausting at the same time. Cantera has a great variety of projects located all through-out the city and in surrounding towns and rural communities. Right now there are about 10 different projects in which I would love to work! We are hoping to have a better idea of our specific assignments by the end of next week.

In addition to getting to know Cantera, we have also been trying to get to know our neighborhood (barrio) and neighbors (vecinos). I’ll fill you in on the basics… Our barrio is called Batahola Sur and it is huge! Everyone knows I’m a horrible estimator, but I would guess it would take at least an hour to walk to the other side of our barrio... and that’s if you go direct, walking all the streets would take significantly longer. (we have probably seen 1/10 of it, maybe less) We are renting a small house right on the edge of the barrio. Since we are on the edge our street is paved, but it’s the last paved road in our section of the barrio. It hasn’t been very windy, so it’s really not dusty at all except when cars pass by. Although we are currently in the rainy season, it has been incredibly dry here. We get rain every couple days, but it’s generally a quick down pour and then the sun and the heat are back. 😊 September and October are supposed to be heavy rain months, so we’ll see how our roads do then. One thing about the rain though… we have tin roofs, so when it’s raining hard it is loud!

All houses here are completely gated or fenced in. Ours happens to be gated with a small front yard and drive way to park one car. The house was completely empty when we signed the lease, so little by little we are filling it up with our basic needs. The front room is one large open space that will serve as our living room and where we will receive guests. It looks very empty at the moment as it only has a one table and 4 chairs (all lawn furniture). The next room is our kitchen/dining room. They built a sink for us before we came and then we have another set of lawn furniture there which serves as our kitchen table and where we spend most of our time in the house. We use a gas camping stove (it has 2 large burners and 1 small one) for all of our cooking. It takes a little getting used to... but most of the time we can easily get by with the two burners. All the food we cook is from raw materials (meaning no packaged, pre-made or processed foods), so there is really little need for a microwave. We have been trying to make as many traditional foods as possible…and have actually had more or less success! 😊 It definitely helped having 3 weeks with families to learn how to prepare traditional foods and drinks! Oh yes, and we do have a refrigerator as well!

Continuing on with the house…attached to the kitchen is a small bathroom. We have running water in the house most of the day. We don’t have hot water…but in this heat you honestly never miss it! The water runs out usually in the afternoon and most days it doesn’t return until we get up the next morning. To solve this problem, we fill up a bunch of buckets with water before we leave in the morning. This is more than sufficient to wash dishes and what not when we return at night. We recently got a few more buckets as well, so it’s even enough to wash your clothes! (We wash them by hand). One of the good things about the water going off is that we use a lot less water and are getting very skilled at conserving what we have (especially on the days when we forget to fill the water! It takes a while to fill so you have to remember first thing in the morning, and not a couple minutes before you leave!) We generally try to reuse the water as well…for example we have a dirty water bucket which we pour all the used water in; this water is then perfect for flushing the toilet at night! The water in the city is actually heavily chlorinated and therefore safe to drink and cook with. It’s not recommended for new comers, but thankfully God blessed me with a strong stomach, and I haven’t had any problems with the water. 😊 We do have a clay filter that we will use to filter the water for drinking, but we are still in the beginning stages of cycling through the water to get rid of the clay taste.

Off of the kitchen are two bedrooms. We drew cards the first night to decide who would get the single and who would be sharing. Chelsea ending up in the single room and Kate and I are sharing the other. We deciding for the sake of keeping the community equal we will be rotating rooms every 6 months. Chelsea’s room locks and has a window to the back patio. Our room doesn’t have either, but it does have a window that looks into the kitchen. This might be better for insect purposes, but it does make for a hot and dark room! Due to the extreme heat, we all sleep with fans; this is actually a common practice in all the households here. When the power goes out it’s a problem because nobody’s fans work! Fortunately that hasn’t happened to us yet. The fans are also useful for keeping the mosquitoes at bay. In Granada I slept under a bug net…but I wouldn’t say it was a necessity. They bought nets for us here, but since we haven’t found a way to put them up yet, we haven’t been using them. I haven’t had much of a problem with bugs though. You get used to little bugs being in the house, and more than anything we welcome the geckos and daddy-longlegs to eat up the others. Managua has had many mosquito campaigns, and there are even times when then pass out little bags to put in your water buckets to kill the larvae.
We also have a back patio off of the kitchen. It has a covered area with a sink that’s great for washing dishes and clothes. Our clothes lines are there as well. There are hooks for a hammock too which we are hoping to have one day. Then there is also a large open concrete area. It’s actually plenty of room to construct another bedroom ; our idea however is to break through some of the concrete and put in some fruit trees and some other plants. It is very common to have gardens and trees in your house and our land lords seem rather in favor of the idea…so I’ll keep you posted. 😊

Well that was a very detailed account of our house, but hopefully it gives you a good idea of our living situation. The house seems very empty at the moment, but once we find a way to decorate the walls and what not, it should feel homier. 😊 Well I really wanted to give you an idea of our neighborhood, so let me get to that. As I said, it’s a dirt barrio and all the houses are side by side and all individually fenced in one way or another. Our house is all concrete with tiled floors. Many of the houses are also concrete; however a lot are made of scrap metal and wood as well. Most all of the yards are dirt, we have one of the few small grass lawns. There are many little stores in the barrios, which just like in Granada are simply the front portion of people’s houses. They sell everything, soap, produce, water, eggs, etc. Not all the shops sell the same things, and not all for the same prices. We are learning little by little where to get things and for what prices. In general though, we will buy from all the ones near our house (there are about 4 that are easily less than a minute walk from our front door!); this will hopefully help us to get to know the vecinos better and keep up good relationships with all of them. There are also people who sell cooked beans, tortillas (different than Mexican tortillas), etc in their houses. Buying cooked beans is actually not much more expensive than raw beans… and you save the 2 hours of gas it takes to cook them! So far we’ve done both. It’s customary here to cook enough beans for the whole week at once as to save gas money.

The neighborhood also has one main Catholic Church which is relatively close to us, and then a chapel further away. In addition there are pharmacies, doctors, dentists, internet cafes, parks etc. We live right next to a field for soccer and baseball (which is actually the national sport, not soccer!) and a basketball court. The main reason we are renting this house is due to its close proximity to our local coordinator Chepe. Chepe is from New York originally but has been in Nicaragua for about 30 years now. He moved to Managua maybe 7 years ago, and has been working with Cantera since then. He isn’t a Capuchin but is with another order called Little Brothers of Jesus. He is a lot of fun and has been a huge help! He lives only a couple streets away, so it has made the transition into the barrio very easy.

We are slowly getting to know our vecinos. Here everyone hangs out in the streets, so we have been able to meet people that way. The first few days we had a lot of trouble with the locks to get into our house…which was good material for conversation starters. Fortunately with some tips from the neighbors, that problem is more or less solved. Here it’s really helpful to be on good terms with your vecinos, because they help keep watch over your house and let you know who comes by during the day. There is also a volunteer watchman who guards our area of the barrio. It’s really more of a precautionary thing…but he is really nice and very helpful! We all pay him a little every 2 weeks and he keeps an eye on the house, collects our bills (there’s no mail box or anything), and does odd jobs as needed for us. We get a good laugh because the name for watchman here is: guachiman, but its pronounced like “watchy-man”. 😊

Well it seems as if I have rambled on for far too long and there is still so much I could say! Hopefully you can sort of picture us in our new home anyway! Pictures will be coming soon 😊

Besos!

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